Paper short abstract:

The worldview that modernism brought led us to the current crisis of survival that we face. This should make obvious the need for a change in the western worldview. To this end, a selection of traditional stories from around the world capable of transmitting a complex-systems worldview is proposed.

Paper long abstract:

Latour argues that any effort to sustain life in the critical zone of the Earth should leave modern epistemologies behind, and adds that the modernist framework permeates even social movements, including those that seek to mitigate climate disaster.

As an activist, I must admit that many times I have suggested similar ideas to Latour's within the social movement in which I am active, Extinction Rebellion, noting that many of us continue to share the same worldview that has brought us to the climate emergency.

On the other hand, as a social scientist, my proposals go beyond non-violent direct action in the streets, advocating the need for a change in worldview that takes us away from the modernism, anthropocentrism, and the mechanism, duality and disjunction of the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm, to a complex-systmes, ecocentric, organicist, integrative and transpersonal worldview. This would be, in line with Donella Meadows and Gregory Bateson, the most direct way for a transformation which leads humans to feel like one more thread in the fabric of life.

In order to disseminate such a worldview, I propose those educational tools with which the worldview of all cultures was conveyed: myths, legends and folktales. Curiously, and confirming Latour suggestions, the stories from oral cultures showed in my research to have more complex-systems thinking contents than the stories belonging to written cultures.

A selection of stories from cultures around the Earth, with systemic and ecocentric characteristics, is the objective of an international project launched a year ago: The Earth Stories Collection.